When are tags looking like meta-tags not meta-tags?

Question

From The Death of Meta Tags - Stack Overflow Blog (emphasis mine):

How can you tell you’re using a meta-tag? It’s easier than you might think.

• If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag
• If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag

So is it possible to have a tag that can't work as the only tag on a question, but is yet is not a meta-tag? And is it possible to have a tag that commonly means different things to different people, but is yet not a meta-tag? If yes, then you give some examples for this?

Answer 1

So is it possible to have a tag that can't work as the only tag on a question, but yet not a meta-tag?

Perhaps [performance] on Stack Overflow? Without a proper technology-specific tag like [javascript] or [python], a question won't get much attention because of the personalized homepages. Yet it's often a defining characteristic within a question, so it warrants a separate tag.

Another case is sites which have an unwritten policy that (almost all) questions must be tagged with a tag from a certain collection (e.g. Arqade and Board & Card Games with a tag specific to the game, Expatriates and to a lesser extent Law with a country/region-specific tag). A question tagged with just [rules] on Sports is probably the result of tag pruning.

Is it possible to have a tag that commonly means different things to different people, but yet not a meta-tag?

Yes. Here are (currently) 344 of such examples, where the Stack Overflow community spotted such a tag but decided to disambiguate them. It happens on other sites as well; here on Meta Stack Exchange it usually happens as part of a burninate-request.

Answer 2

You're asking two separate but related questions, lets unpack it:

1. A tag that:

   1.1. can't work as the only tag on a question

   1.2. but is yet not a meta-tag?

In the context of programming these are actually very common, the simplest example are tags that:

• require a parent or language tag. (Check the wikis that say: "Must/Please/Should include a language tag")

• because, they refer to a programmatic construct or type, e.g [tag:enum] wiki , [tag:closures] wiki that is off-topic without implementation specific details. (Definition of on-topic on Stack Overflow is "a specific programming problem")

2. A tag that:

   2.1. commonly means different things to different people

   2.2. but is yet not a meta-tag?

The first example can again apply, if you check the bottom of the [tag:enum] wiki you'll see the keyword expresses different concepts depending on the language.

However, it's the combination of the secondary tag with the language/parent tag that gives an exact, accurate and unambiguous meaning to the search results that allows to filter mere textual occurrences from posts that are specifically about the concept/construct.

P.S: A more complex example could be the [tag:documentation] wiki with its current state reflecting an incomplete tag burnination (likely due to the complexity of completing it), see It is safe to burn all of our [documentation].